I just found this online, and I was wondering how well it worked with your picky eaters. My son lives on rice, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, and bologna basically. About the only 'vegetables' he'll eat are mashed potatoes and corn.

No. I've always been up front with my kids about what is in their food. I have never purposely tried to sneak something into a dish to get them to eat it. Sometimes a recipe will call for something a kid doesn't like and unless I am asked, I don't offer up the information. I have had people try and sneak stuff past me (tell me it is something it is not) and all it does is destroy my trust in them. The last thing I want is for my kids to not trust me.

I found my picky one is more likely to try something if it is NOT offered to her. She usually will ask for a taste. She starts off by smelling it, then if it makes it past her sniff test, she will take a little bite. She is usually good about giving it a second taste before making up her mind.

Mine is terrible! If I can get him to try something (not likely) he will usually answer "no thank you" to my questioning if he wants some. But most everything to him smells nasty. I did get him to eat carrots once, but he was taking the tiniest bites, I doubt he could taste them! I keep trying to talk him into it (if you try it you'll like it), but he's not buyin it. He is by far the worst picky eater I have had experience with. I personally see nothing wrong with 'tricking' him into eating good things, what he doesn't know won't hurt him.

Have you thought about making him smoothies? You can put quite a lot of healthy stuff inside such as silken tofu, fruit, honey, bananas, carrots etc. and it will still taste good. If the colour doesn't turn him off you can also add spinach or other greens, otherwise you can start off with more familiar things like strawberries etc. Sometimes they will drink things that they won't eat.

My MIL raised four kids. One hated bananas, one hated green peppers, and I forget the quirks of the other two, if any. She cooked what she wanted and used the ingredients she wanted. The kids either ate what was on the table or went hungry. There were no snacks available. They all grew up. Nobody died and she didn't fuss at them either.

When children are very young, they'll eat just about anything you give them. We eat a lot of asian food (due to my wife's celiac condition), and the kids took to the wide variety at an early age.

However, once they got to the age where they are fairly mobile, they get very picky about food. The theory I had read indicated that this was for self-protection ... they're now old enough to get out of sight of their parents, and in man's earlier hunter-gatherer history, it would be a bad thing if they just randomly tried to eat anything they found when you weren't looking while out gathering food.

Ours seemed to follow this pattern; as soon as they were fairly mobile, the fussy eating habits set in. Anything familiar was ok, anything not familiar was terrible. Food could not ever touch other food on the plate. They instictively developed an intense fear of all mushrooms.

We got over this by having them help to prepare food as soon as they were old enough. Mine love to help cook, and my daughter was able to scramble eggs by herself at four years ... only rule was "no turning on the stove, parents do that!"

She is seven now, and generally washes and cuts all the vegetables while I cut and start cooking the meat when we make stir fries or curries. She gets to measure the rice and water. Both of our children will happily eat whatever they've helped prepare, and are even adventurous about begging to try new things they see on "Food Network." My daughter insisted on buying shrimp for "her" stir-fry just because it is a common ingrediant in her "cooking mama" game on the Nintendo DS.

If we eat out, though, the younger still insists on chicken nuggets or a hot dog wherever we go. He'll eat curried lamb at home, but won't go near Grandma's meat loaf. Her Lasagne gives him fits ... no telling what might be hiding in that! ... but if he had helped make it, he'd be fine with all those things layered together.

So ... if you can get them cooking, maybe you can get them eating! It took a while for this to work for us, but it is working quite well.

Because of my wife's dietary restictions, we do most of our cooking from scratch, so the kids know exactly what's going in to each dish, and they're much better about eating it.